What Are the Computational Overhead and Transaction Cost Implications of Implementing ZKPs on a Public Blockchain?

Implementing ZKPs on-chain carries significant computational overhead. Generating a proof is computationally intensive and is typically done off-chain.

Verifying the proof on-chain, while less intensive than generation, still consumes more gas than a standard transaction. This results in higher transaction costs (gas fees) and increased latency for users.

Layer-2 scaling solutions, like zk-rollups, are designed to mitigate this by batching many transactions together off-chain, generating a single proof, and then verifying that one proof on the main chain, which amortizes the high cost across many users.